The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Crashes Call for Linux Patching

Issues that are experienced while playing a single video game wouldn’t normally get the attention of lead developers working on the operating system it runs within, but that’s exactly what happened over on GitHub when Linux creator Linus Torvalds was made aware of crashing that can occur when playing The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings on the OS, and consequently committed his time to creating a patch. This write-up on Softpedia has all of the details, along with a quick history of some of the other problems the RPG sequel has had on Linux:

Do not break user space

This is one of the mantras of Linux kernel development and it’s been repeated ad nauseam by Linus Torvalds. Basically, it means that developers should not have to work around stuff that can be fixed in the kernel and that kernel developers should not make changes that would force app developers to adjust their work.

This is the reason why Linus Torvalds left a message on GitHub, on one of the topics for Witcher 2 in which he explained that a problem which needed to be solved by the game developers was actually in the kernel, and that he would write a patch for it.

“It looks like LDT_empty is buggy on 64-bit kernels. I suspect that the behavior was inconsistent before the tightening change and that it’s now broken as a result. I’ll write a patch. Serves me right for not digging all the way down the mess of macros,” wrote Linus on GitHub.